August: Osage County

The comforting thing about putting up a play on Broadway is that there are weeks of previews. If actors are pursuing mistaken ideas about their character, if they have the tone of the show completely wrong, they will go out before a live audience and lay an egg - and afterward be humbly receptive to whatever the director and playwright have to say. Over time, the ensemble will come together in pursuit of a single vision, and a play that seemed like nonsense two weeks before will be revealed as genius when it opens for critics.

Alas, with movies, that is not the case. The actors go before the cameras with what is close to a first draft, which makes the guidance of a strong director all-important. But what happens if the director is relatively inexperienced at directing features? And what happens if the actress destroying the movie is rightly recognized as one of the greatest in the world? Then you have the formula for disaster - for "August: Osage County," a thoroughly botched, distorted and unrealized rendering of a brilliant American play.

The failure of this film is an occasion for more than perfunctory lamentation, because it represents something beyond a missed opportunity. Movies can be shown everywhere and movies are forever, which means that this film is bound to serve as an ongoing bad-will ambassador for a great work of art, not only around the world but also down through time. Already, intelligent people who never saw the play are speculating that perhaps the film revealed weaknesses in Tracy Letts' writing - but no, that is not the case. Not at all.

The problem was that director John Wells did not understand the play, or at the very least, he did not make his actors understand the play, even at its most basic level. Here's one little example: The actors onscreen are under the impression that they're in a straight drama, and they're not. They're in a very dark comedy.

Perhaps the tonal weirdness of the film can best be expressed this way: At least 80 percent of what's wrong with "August: Osage County" could have been solved by casting June Squibb ("Nebraska") in the lead role instead of Meryl Streep.

Pill-popping monster

As conceived by Letts, Violet is a pill-popping monster, an evil matriarch with a foul and vicious mouth, utterly confident and pleased with herself, not at all self-pitying, although she'll feign self-pity if she needs to. She is one of those grand characters that an audience sees and within seconds knows, OK, we're going to have a good time with her. Deanna Dunagan's Broadway performance was one for the ages, and she was succeeded by Estelle Parsons ("Bonnie and Clyde"), just to give you an idea of the proper vibe.

Horrible, but funny. That's the role. More than the role, it's the whole play - its appeal, its nature, its genre. So what happens? Meryl Streep walks into her first scene, like she's playing Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," and soon delivers a key line, one in which Violet lashes out at her husband and establishes her character in a sentence: "Why don't you go f- a f-' sow's ass?" The line can't quite be printed, but even its shadow identifies it as appalling and funny, and not the sad cry from the heart that Streep plays.

Needs strong director

Perhaps braying stridency is outside Streep's range. Perhaps she had a strange desire to do something different. Perhaps she had a weird take on the script. Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, Streep digs deep inside and locates Violet's sadness, her vulnerability, her intelligence and even her inner child and hammers on those qualities from the entrance. These should be discoveries, the result of layers being pulled off over the course of the action, and even then, they should be subtle and balanced by a host of other, less flattering qualities, like spite and resentment.

Is this another case of a movie star's insisting on being likable, or is this just a bad mistake? Either way, here is where a strong director needed to step in, save his actress and rescue the picture.

Everything else onscreen is a 50-car pileup. Streep is the accident. As Violet's eldest daughter, Julia Roberts matches Streep, and she's fine, though it's never good to give Roberts an excuse to act sullen. Julianne Nicholson brings sensitivity and presence to the relatively straight role of the middle sister, Ivy. But only Juliette Lewis as the youngest sister, Karen, and Margo Martindale as Aunt Mattie Fae have a complete grasp of the material's proper tone, which is not quite realistic but mixes black comedy with drama.

Throughout, Wells seems lost. The blocking of the actors and the cutting are arbitrary, with no psychological or dramatic purpose. In one example, Chris Cooper, as the genial uncle, delivers a blistering takedown of his abusive wife and storms off. But Wells undercuts the impact of his exit by having the camera float outside, to show Charlie, in a long shot, just standing around doing nothing.

"August: Osage County" was a three-hour play that felt like two hours. It has been made into a two-hour movie that feels like a month.